Lorain BMV to close at end of month

LORAIN -- The Ohio driver's license bureau in Lorain will close at the end of the month, according to the Ohio Department of Public Safety's Bureau of Motor Vehicles.

That will be bad news for downtown Lorain, local officials said. However, state figures show the Lorain office "is a low-volume agency," according to the BMV.

BMV Deputy Registrar Cheryl Waisure submitted her resignation letter Dec. 12, 2012, to leave the post effective March 31, according to information supplied by the BMV.

This week, Lorain County Clerk of Courts Ron Nabakowski wrote to Gov. John Kasich with a request to appoint county Auditor Craig Snodgrass as deputy registrar.

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Then, the auditor's and clerk of courts' staff could work to provide a one-stop office for drivers to get licenses, car titles and license plates, Nabakowski said. A former colleague of Kasich in the Ohio Senate, Nabakowski said making Lorainites travel to other cities for their drivers' licenses was unconscionable.

The news of the closure also prompted criticism from Snodgrass, Lorain Safety-Service Director Robert Fowler and former Lorain councilman Andy Drwal, who is running to represent Ward 2 where the license bureau is.

"I can't believe they would let the 10th largest city in the state go without a license bureau," Fowler said. "I just can't believe that."

However, the Lorain Agency is a low-volume agency that only completed 38,153 transactions in 2012, according to figures from Lindsey Bohrer, BMV public information officer for the Ohio Department of Public Safety.

By transaction county, the Lorain office is the lowest producing full service agency in Field Services District 1 and the 25th lowest statewide. District 1 is responsible for 56 agencies covering a 10 county area in the northeast part of the state, according to ODPS figures.

When the Lorain office closes, the county still will have three deputy registrars within a 13-mile radius of the Lorain office. Those locations are in Amherst, Elyria and Avon Lake, according to the BMV.

There also are offices in Wellington and in North Ridgeville.

The Amherst office is 4.5 miles west, according to the state figures. Even so, it would be helpful to keep the office in Lorain, local officials said.

Limiting availability to Amherst or Elyria will create some hardships for people getting drivers' licenses, Snodgrass said.

Drwal agreed the Lorain office also brings people downtown.

"I think it's not a good move in respect to the overall picture of downtown Lorain, bringing people downtown and obviously the inconvenience of having to travel to further parts of the city or out of the city to get license plates," Drwal said.

The Lorain County Auditor's Office, with help from the clerk of courts, in 2009 and 2012 submitted two "sub-standard" proposals to work as deputy registrar. Both proposals were rejected for incomplete information, Bohrer said.

However, Snodgrass contested the claim the proposals were incomplete and said the county auditor's office once had a perfect score proposing to operate the Elyria license bureau. However, the state office did not award the job to the Lorain County auditor, he said.